Many of his video game or (current, pop) cultural references seem to stem from the challenges he faces teaching students for whom these references are their only exposure to pre-modern ideas.
I'll be honest though: I wouldn't have referred to numerous historical encyclopedias and visited countless museums to learn about history, if I hadn't started out playing a demo version of Age of Empires 2 when I was 6. Once I saw a map of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, and for the next two weeks, I was hell-bent on creating a Jerusalem on the map editor in AoE. And a few years back, on a work trip to Israel, I ended up visiting the city just to see the places I had built out nearly 2 decades earlier.